After a few teething problems with my rotoscope projection I need to test paper and refine the working process… All of this gives me more time to get comfortable freehand drawing with the conte and charcoal I’ve chosen to work in. Being extra careful as it’s a messy business, and a smudge in the wrong place could affect the way my drawing looks. I can’t wait to put the animation frames in between, but essentially I am working on the keyframes currently.

I’m using a small grater to create my own coloured powder as this gives me a little more flexibility to work bit by bit as I could buy charcoal powder, but would probably be tempted to use too much and be too heavy handed with it, but through the testing last night I found that the black conte and the charcoal take to the paper in different ways, I was only able to test 3 of the paper samples as they take a little time to produce.

Putting the paper and projection into the right place I start with light outlines of the body (using the grey conte) and then choose a real feather to work with. I try and match the shape or the curve of the projected photo frame with the real feathers I have, then grate the colour I want onto a tiny palette. Placing the clean feather in situ I swipe a small amount of powder over the edge of the feather and add more or less depending on how it takes and how it looks. This is where I found the conte giving great grip and almost biting the colour dust from me and drawing it into the paper, whereas with the charcoal it could be light and adding a second sweep can move or smudge the original outline, plus the dust does eventually get through the feather, and reprints underneath where you don’t want it and in an unclean fashion…

I tried to use the paper samples just in order as they were rolled up so I don’t know which is which yet but here are the first 3 in the paper test set.

With projectionwithout projection

Detail, this is using charcoal dust, charcoal lines and a white conte line to highlight, I also used a yellow conte dust over feather to try and indicate where the coloured feathers of the Bustard are, but it seems a little lost in the final image.

Second frame, with projection

Without projection, this time I added in a few light strokes to indicate the speckled feathers and added yellow conte dust, and some brown dust applied over feathers and this works better for giving indication of the shape and coloured areas.

Detail.

Third keyframe, with projection

without projection, this paper has a slight cream hue and I tried the white conte for highlight but am unsure as to whether it adds anything, I think the paper would need to be darker… This time I used the black conte dust for the wing tips and it really took well, giving fantastic high contrast. Using the charcoal I was able to smudge for depth in the right places and again the yellow dust over feathers works really well. I was very pleased with this particular combination of marks, but not so pleased with paper choice.

Detail, you can really see how much conte dust works into the edge over the feather here, really good definition. But you can also see a few finger smudges which I need to be careful of.

I will test the other 3 paper samples so that I can make a choice, all the time practising and refining my technique and I estimate I will need at least one full movement of flight comprising approximately 12 images for a second of animation. The best of these images I would like to display gallery style as one of my aims was to make a beautiful piece of animation/art.

I want to test the keyframes when finished into a very short animatic and see how the lines and marks work when animated, I may need to lessen the swipe length, it may be confusing, at the moment, in my head it looks beautiful!

So I set all of these items out next to my computer so I could control what was projected and started on the newsprint paper that I love using for Life drawing… and here was my first problem, the newsprint really doesn’t take the powder I sweep onto the feather and onto the paper to make the relief imprint…

So I needed different paper, the only large paper I had was A2 size cartridge paper, lightweight and fairly smooth..

So I began working in the feathers and simple lines and another problem rears up, because I am working on an upright easel, the powder tends to ‘drip’ down the page, unlike my primary experiments when I was working over the top of my page.

It doesn’t turn out to bad…

Then I look at another of the flying reference images I have…

beginners mistake! I will need to re-set out my easel and space so I keep in mind the top and bottom of my projection images.

Also will need to test different paper, to find the best feel for the feathers and powder marks I want to get into the frames…